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t HE preceding chapters present a detailed picture of Eighth Army’s readiness . Although it would be incorrect to state that units in Japan were fully prepared for combat in 1950, the descriptions of soft Occupation soldiers offered by most of the authors discussed in chapter 1 simply do not stand up to scrutiny. It is a fact that the U.S. Army in 1950 suffered from a multitude of internal and external problems, and the cumulative effects of these problems made success in combat problematic. Three other facts must be borne in mind, however, in making any assessment of Eighth Army’s training program. First, most of these problems did not originate in Eighth Army. Instead, they resulted from decisions made by officials of the Truman administration with the active assistance of senior U.S. Army officers. Second, these problems did not deter commanders at every level from seeking to enhance the combat readiness of their units. The variety of solutions pursued by combat, combat support, and even combat service support units described above indicates that the shift in outlook was not restricted to infantry regiments or artillery battalions. Instead, there was a force-wide attempt to instill a warrior ethos in the soldiers of the Eighth Army. As incomplete and uneven as this process was on June 25, 1950, it is not difficult to imagine Eighth Army’s fate had it not begun at all. Third, it is incorrect to lay the bulk of the blame for the reverses suffered in the summer and fall of 1950 at the feet of the officers and men of Eighth Army. The elimination of critical components of infantry and artillery organizations, the promulgation of personnel policies that retarded the development of unit cohesion , and a willful disregard for the importance of maintaining a basic training 8 Conclusions 109 110 program of instruction that produced fully qualified soldiers were deliberate decisions made by the Army Staff in Washington, D.C., without consideration for the tacticalandoperationalimpactsuchdecisionswouldhaveoncombatoperations. Moreover, the Truman administration’s chronic inability to articulate a force structure requirement that it could live with for more than a few months generated unsustainable personnel turbulence on the entire U.S. Army. Therefore, critics of the army’s performance in the Korean War must cast a wider net for clues as to why the nation that defeated Germany and Japan left its army hardly capable of retaining a lodgment in southeastern Korea only five years later. Some basic themes emerge from this study that will help in the search for those clues. First, many if not most Americans viewed a large army with ambivalence in 1950. Second, the postwar demobilization and the U.S. Army’s own personnel policies resulted from President Truman’s failure to articulate a feasible and acceptable national military policy following the Japanese surrender. Third, no one in the War/Defense Department in the late 1940s seems to have understood the national security implications inherent in the unregulated disposal of war material and an almost nonexistent procurement budget. Fourth, and related to the second theme, the army’s training doctrine had not changed significantly from what had sufficed to defeat the Axis powers. Little agitation for change existed because of wide acceptance of the alert-train-deploy model regarding use of ground forces. Finally, the influence battlefield experience or lack thereof played in coloring the perceptions and priorities of officers and noncommissioned officers cannot be quantified but must be considered as a factor bearing on individual units’ achieving the desired readiness goals. The use of the atomic bomb to end World War II changed the paradigm of national defense for the United States. Contemporary observers both in and outside the Defense Department began to believe that conventional ground and even naval forces were henceforth not just useless but dangerous if by their existence they encouraged leaders to contemplate war. Acknowledging the need for an Occupation force to maintain order in the defeated Axis nations by no means equated to an open-ended commitment to the maintenance of a large standing army. Indeed, such a force was believed to be antithetical to the economic interests of the republic and a break with tradition. The rapid demobilization of the U.S. Army in 1945–47 resulted directly from congressional demands that American citizens be released from service with the passing of the emergency—as had happened after every conflict since 1783. By this reasoning the army should have been told to anticipate manpower...

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